“It's truly gratifying to be honored by your peers in this way,” Hirschberg says.

Each fellow was nominated for their specific contributions, as noted by the ACL: McKeown, for her significant contributions to natural language generation and multi-document summarization; Hirschberg, for her significant contributions to intonation, discourse, text-to-speech systems, and labeling standards for speech corpora; and Collins, for his significant contributions to natural language parsing and discriminative training.

McKeown notes that Columbia had the largest number of founding fellows of any university.

“This is an indication of the comparative strength of the natural language processing team at Columbia, which includes four strong researchers at the Center for Computational Learning Systems as well,” she says.

The Association for Computational Linguistics is the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. Its journal, Computational Linguistics, is considered the primary forum for research on computational linguistics and natural language processing.